As an agency, we provide a free audit of our Sponsored Ads account. During the audit, we go through your campaigns and analyse what are the strong and weak points of your setup. We then present our findings with recommendations on how to remedy the situation with an estimate on missed sales.
Having done a couple of hundred of these in the past 3 years since Amerge started. In this blog post series, we’ll go through the most common pitfalls we consistently come across. This first is unchecked waste spend.
Unchecked wasted spend
To keep things simple, we’re going to say that wasted spend is any targeting with spend above 5 dollars and 0 sales or anything with an ACOS higher than 100%. I’m sure we can go down a rabbit hole here as to what to include or exclude into this consideration as that’s probably a topic for another blog post. Just know that these are the targetings you can get rid of, and they won’t affect your total sales. On the contrary, will improve your total ACOS/ROAS.
It’s unavoidable mainly if you’re testing different approaches or pushing heavily into promoting a new product. Any account will always have some amount of wasted spend. In extreme cases, we saw wasted spend up to 52%. Up to 10% of total spend is tolerable if your account is properly managed. So, the difference is whether you manage it or leave it unchecked which will ultimately ruin your performance. Unchecked wasted spend occurs with a general lack of targeting pausing.
Pausing is the most effective way how to deal with targeting which doesn’t work. At the end day, you need to look yourself in the mirror and admit that one keyword you really want to work for you spent over $100 without a single conversion and it’s time to hit pause. Moving around the bid isn’t going magically into your top seller. Just pause it and use the money on what’s working. If you insist on keeping it and trying again, split it out into a campaign or ad group and manage it separately.
To limit wasted spend we have developed an automation software, the Amerge Engine to pause targeting. We developed it so that it back-checks its decision and tests whether it has made the right call to pause a targeting. From what we see the Engine goes back on its decision and re-enables a targeting only 4% of the time. So, don’t be afraid to pause, and don’t cling to what’s clearly not working for you.
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